Monday, November 29, 2010

For the DVD that will be out next week, I wrote an essay called "Fixing the Sonosopher." Here a couple of the thoughts that came to me again after seeing the film today:

Fixing the Sonosopher

by Scott Abbott

About three years ago I was bathing with a young man whose development at that time had a wonderful grace about it. . . . As it happened we had just seen, in Paris, the youth pulling a thorn out of his foot. . . . Resting his foot on a stool, to dry it, and glancing at himself as he did so in a large mirror, he was reminded of the statue; he smiled and told me what he had seen. . . . He raised his foot a second time, to show me; but the attempt, very predictably, failed. In confusion he raised his foot a third time, a fourth, again and again, a dozen times: in vain. He was incapable of reproducing the movement. . . . From that day, or from that very moment, forth the young man underwent an unbelievable transformation. He began spending days in front of the mirror; and one after the other all his charms deserted him. (From Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Puppet Theatre,” translation by David Constantine)

About three weeks ago I had lunch with a man of my age whose performances as a “Sonosopher” have a wonderful, if sometimes terrible, grace about them. We spoke about a film he had recently collaborated on. After seeing himself through the camera’s eye, Alex said, he has been unable to reproduce the movements, the gestures, the sounds the camera recorded. At least he can no longer do so naturally. His charms, he fears, have deserted him.

I mentioned the young man in Kleist’s essay.

Exactly, he said. I’ve been robbed of the grace of un-self-conscious movement. I’ve been pinned to a specimen board for observation.

You feel like you’ve been fixed? I asked.

Yes, he answered. The film has fixed me, neutered me. How do I continue? My work is process, my media are temporal, sonorous, fleeting.

To what extent is that true? I wondered later. Has this film, in fact, fixed the Sonosopher?

As with all works of art, from one version to the next there’s a sense of panic brought on by the knowledge that the composer or writer or painter or filmmaker will have to settle on the final, fixed version, knowing all the time that it is just one of an infinite number of versions. Documentary films of a certain kind work to make their audiences forget that fact, constructing a seamless and supposedly truthful narrative. This, I take it, is what Alex most feared.

Friday, November 19, 2010

I was revisiting some of my notes from class and this article came to mind. It is an interview with the "native American" author, Sherman Alexie in which some very interesting points are raised. Here is a section I found useful. Especially pertinent are the ideas of collective trauma, blood memory, and the Holocaust connection.

AN: I find the concept of "collective trauma" particularly useful concerning the suffering that many of your characters are experiencing. Many of them suffer from not only personal losses and grievances--absent fathers, poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, etc.--but also from a cultural loss and a collective trauma, which include experiences of racism and stereotyping. Their losses and grievances affect their behavior and their lives on many levels. In my view, your fiction explores how such trauma both damages and creates community and identity alike. Both identity and community are, of course, condemned to ongoing dysfunction. Do you think that suffering is part of what constitutes Indianness? Perhaps in a somewhat comparable way by which we have come to associate African American identity with slavery, or Jewish identity with the Holocaust? If so, how does this relation differ from, e.g., the relation between African Americans and suffering, or Jews and suffering?

SA: Yes! The phrase I've also used is "blood memory." I think the strongest parallel in my mind has always been the Jewish people and the Holocaust. Certainly, their oppression has been constant for 1900 years longer, but the fact is that you cannot separate our identity from our pain. At some point it becomes primarily our identity. The whole idea of authenticity--"How Indian are you?"--is the most direct result of the fact that we don't know what an American Indian identity is. There is no measure anymore. There is no way of knowing, except perhaps through our pain. And so, we're lost. We're always wandering.

AN: Like the lost tribes of Israel?

SA: Yes. It's so amazing that the indigenous people of the United States have become the most immigrant group. The process is slowly changing. My generation and the next generation--we are immigrants! I am an immigrant into the United States, and now my children are fully assimilated.

AN: A scholar by the name of Kai Erikson has put a social dimension into the term "trauma." He talks about "traumatized communities" in the sense of damages to the tissues that hold human groups together as well as to the dominant spirit of a group, which is a fitting concept when we talk about "collective trauma" or "blood memory."

SA: Yes it is. Some day they're going to find it, but I feel that it is true that pain is carried in the DNA. And because it is carried in the DNA, pain can mutate through generations. One of the most obvious proofs for that is child abuse. Kids who get abused so often grow up and become abusers.

AN: Many of your characters--Victor and Junior in The Lone Ranger and Reservation Blues, John Smith in Indian Killer, Harlan in Ten Little Indians, to mention a few--are struggling with their experiences of what it means to be an Indian, and what they are told it means to be an Indian. At times, they seem at a loss as to what Indian identity really IS. Is their struggle linked with the fact that Indian identity has often been reduced to stereotype? In other words, do you think that the long-term reduction of the Indian to stereotype in American culture has resulted in a collective crisis of identity for many Indians today?

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Wednesday's lecture has been running across my mind, like a broken record, for the past day and a half. I could not get Theo Bleckmann's rendition of "Lili Marleen" out of my head. It was so hauntingly beautiful that it made me want to cry for joy as well as fall into a million pieces. Wednesday night I went home and played "Lili Marleen" again, and then listened to some of his other musical pieces that he has done. As a result, my brain started to click and my thoughts went from one connection to another. I started to remember things from as early as my childhood to things as recent as this summer. I began to see things that I have surrounded myself in, in a new light. So here are 3 of my thoughts stemmed from Theo Bleckmann.

1) Sigur Ros, through there volenska (english translation: Hopelandic-meaning ' unintelligible lyrics') has, in my opinion, broken the language barrier. They have produced music that is able to be swallowed by, (as Professor Caldiero says) the mouths of our souls. Here is their song "Von" which is a part of the volenska music (as far as I understand).

2) My second thought had to do more with remake of songs. Just as Theo Bleckmann added his own twist to the already popular "Lili Marleen" WWI song, Billy Bell and Allstar Ade, performing a Stacey Tookey contemporary routine, added a new twist to Tears for Fears "Mad World" song. Though the song "Mad World" already does a phenomenal job painting a picture of how the world is hectic, Stacey Tookey is able to zoom into one moment where the world is effecting two people.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

I found this reading interesting. I would like to know what others think of this.

Teaching toTransgress

Education as the Practice of Freedom

I I

Language

Teaching New Worlds/New Words

bell hooks

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body. It was in my first year of college thai I read Adrienne Rich's poem, "The Burning of Paper Instead of Chil­dren." That poem, speaking against domination, against racism and class oppression, attempts to illustrate graphically that stopping the political persecution and torture of living beings is a more vital issue than censorship, than burning books. One line of this poem that moved and disturbed some­thing within me: "This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you." I've never forgotten it. Perhaps I could not have forgotten it even if I tried to erase it from memory. Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will. The words of this poem begat a life in my memory that I could not abort or change.

When I find myself thinking about language now, these words are there, as if they were always waiting to challenge and assist me. 1 find myself silently speaking them over and over again with the intensity of a chant. They startle me, shaking me into an awareness of the link between languages and domina­tion. Initially, I resist the idea of the "oppressor's language," cer­tain that litis construct has the potential to disempower those of us who are just learning to speak, who are just learning to claim language as a place where we make ourselves subject. "This is the oppressor's languages yet I need it to talk to you. " Adrienne Rich's words. Then, when I first read these words, and now, they make me think of standard English, of learning to speak against black vernacular, against the ruptured and broken speech of a dis­possessed and displaced people. Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear, the speech of the Gullah, Yiddish, and so many other unremembered tongues.

Reflecting on Adrienne Rich's words, I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory diat limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize. Gloria Anzakliia reminds us of this pain in Border­lands/La Froniera when she asserts, "So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language." We have so little knowledge of how displaced, enslaved, or free Africans who came or were brought against their will to the United States felt about the loss of language, about learning English. Only as a woman did I begin to think about these black people in rela­tion to language, to think about their trauma as they were com­pelled to witness their language rendered meaningless with a colonizing European culture, where voices deemed foreign could not be spoken, were outlawed tongues, renegade speech.

When I realize how long it has taken for white Americans to acknowledge diverse languages of.Native Americans, to accept that the speech their ancestral colonizers declared was merely grunts or gibberish was indeed language, it is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest. I think now of the grief of displaced "homeless" Africans, forced to inhabit a world where they saw folks like themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition, but who had no shared language to talk with one another, who needed "the oppressor's language." "This is the oppressor's lan­guage yet I need it to talk to you." When I imagine the terror of Africans on board slave ships, on auction blocks, inhabiting the unfamiliar architecture of plantations, I consider that this ter­ror extended beyond fear of punishment, that it resided also in the anguish of hearing a language they could not comprehend. The very sound of English had to terrify. I think of black peo­ple meeting one another in a space away from the diverse cul­tures and languages that distinguished them from one another, compelled by circumstance to find ways to speak with one another in a "new world" where blackness or the darkness ol" one's skin and not language would become the space of bond­ing. How to remember, to reinvoke this terror. How to describe what it must have been like for Africans whose deepest bonds were historically forged in the place of shared speech to be transported abruptly to a world where the very sound of one's mother tongue had no meaning.

I imagine them hearing spoken English as the oppressor's language, yet I imagine them also realizing that this language would need to be possessed, taken, claimed as a space of resis­tance. I imagine that the moment they realized the oppressor's language, seized and spoken by the tongues of the colonized, could be a space of bonding was joyous. For in that recognition was the understanding that intimacy could be restored, that a culture of resistance could be formed that would make recovery from the trauma of enslavement possible. I imagine, then, Africans first hearing English as "the oppressor's language" and then re-hearing it as a potential site of resistance. Learning English, learning to speak the alien tongue, was one way en­slaved Africans began to reclaim their personal power within a context of domination. Possessing a shared language, black folks could find again a way to make community, and a means to create the political solidarity necessary to resist.

Needing the oppressor's language to speak with one anoth­er they nevertheless also reinvented, remade that language so lhat it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination. In the mouths of black Africans in the so-called "New World," English was altered, transformed, and became a different speech. Enslaved black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language. They put togeth­er their words in such a way that the colonizer had to rethink the meaning of English language. Though it has become com­mon in contemporary culture to talk about the messages of resistance that emerged in the music created by slaves, particu­larly spirituals, less is said about'the grammatical construction of sentences in these songs. Often, the English used in the song reflected the broken, ruptured world of the slave. When the slaves sang "nobody knows de trouble I see—" their use of the word "nobody" adds a richer meaning than if they had used the phrase "no one," for it was the slave's body that was the concrete site of suffering. And even as emancipated black people sang spirituals, they did not change the language, the sentence struc­ture, of our ancestors. For in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance. Using English in a way that ruptured standard usage and meaning, so that white folks could often not understand black speech, made English into more than the oppressor's language.

An unbroken connection exists between the broken English of the displaced, enslaved African and the diverse black vernac­ular speech black folks use today. In both cases, the rupture of standard English enabled and enables rebellion and resistance. By transforming the oppressor's language, making a culture of resistance, black people created an intimate speech that could say far more than was permissible within the boundaries of stan­dard English. The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epis-temologies—different ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic worldview. It is abso­lutely essential that the revolutionary power of black vernacular speech not be lost in contemporary culture. That power resides in the capacity of black vernacular to intervene on the bound­aries and limitations of standard English.

In contemporary black popular culture, rap music has be­come one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to lis­ten—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is under­mined. In academic circles, both in the sphere of teaching and that of writing, there has been little effort made to utilize black vernacular—or, for that matter, any language other than stan­dard English. When I asked an ethnically diverse group of stu­dents in a course I was teaching on black women writers why we only heard standard English spoken in the classroom, they were momentarily rendered speechless. Though many of them were individuals for whom standard English was a second or third language, it had simply never occurred to them that it was possible to say something in another language, in another way. No wonder, then, that we continue to think, "This is the op­pressor's language yet I need it to talk to you."

I have realized that I was in danger of losing my relationship to black vernacular speech because I too rarely use it in the pre­dominantly white settings that I am most often in, both profes­sionally and socially. And so I have begun to work at integrating into a variety of settings the particular Southern black vernacu­lar speech 1 grew up hearing and speaking. It has been hardest to integrate black vernacular in writing, particularly for acade­mic journals. When I first began to incorporate black vernacu­lar in critical essays, editors would send the work back to me in standard English. Using the vernacular means that translation into standard English may be needed if one wishes to reach a more inclusive audience. In the classroom setting, I encourage students to use their first language and translate it so they do not feel that seeking higher education will necessarily estrange them from that language and culture they know most intimate­ly. Not surprisingly, when students in my Black Women Writers class began to speak using diverse language and speech, white students often complained. This seemed to be particularly the case with black vernacular. It was particularly disturbing to the white students because they could hear the words that were said but could not comprehend their meaning. Pedagogically, I encouraged them to think of the moment of not understand­ing what someone says as a space to learn. Such a space pro­vides not only the opportunity to listen without "mastery," without owning or possessing speech through interpretation, but also the experience of hearing non-English words. These lessons seem particularly crucial in a multicultural society that remains white supremacist, that uses standard English as a weapon to silence and censor. June Jordan reminds us of this in On Call when she declares:

I am talking about majority problems of language in a democratic state, problems of.a currency that someone has stolen and hidden away and then homogenized into an official "English" language that can only express non-events involving nobody responsible, or lies. If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative participating voic­es of everybody here. We would not tolerate the language of the powerful and, thereby, lose all respect for words, per se. We would make our language conform to .the truth of our many selves and we would make our lan­guage lead us into the equality of power that a democrat­ic state must represent.

That the students in the course on black women writers were repressing all longing to speak in tongues other than stan­dard English widiout seeing this repression as political was an indication of die way we act unconsciously, in complicity with a culture of domination.

Recent discussions of diversity and multiculturalism tend to downplay or ignore the question of language. Critical feminist writings focused on issues of difference and voice have made important theoretical interventions, calling for a recognition of the primacy of voices that are often silenced, censored, or marginalized. This call for the acknowledgment and celebra­tion of diverse voices, and consequently of diverse language and speech, necessarily disrupts the primacy of standard Eng­lish. When advocates of feminism first spoke about the desire for diverse participation in women's movement, there was no discussion of language. It was simply assumed that standard English would remain the primary vehicle for the transmission of feminist thought. Now that die audience for feminist writing and speaking has become more diverse, it is evident that we must change conventional ways of thinking about language, creating spaces where diverse voices can speak in words other than English or in broken, vernacular speech. This means that at a lecture or even in a written work there will be fragments of speech that may or may not be accessible to every individual. Shifting how we think about language and how we use it neces­sarily alters how we know what we know. At a lecture where I might use Southern black vernacular, the particular patois of my region, or where I might use very abstract thought in con­junction with plain speech, responding to a diverse audience, I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to "master" or con­quer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments. I stiggest that we may learn from spaces of silence as well as spaces of speech, that in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and con­sumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediate­ly, or we may disrupt that cultural imperialism that suggests one is worthy of being heard only if one speaks in standard English. Adrienne Rich concludes her poem with this statement:

I am composing on the typewriter late at night, think­ing of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick- Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. oan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in dan­ger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Cantonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to bum. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppres­sor's language.

To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that

there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language. To heal the splitting of mind and body, we margin­alized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for inti­macy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we cre­ate the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular. When I need to say words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality, I speak black vernacular. There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor's language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating ourselves in language.

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

TAGS:

Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn’t all that fancy. Let’s compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly. Both are made up of cells, of course, with neurons playing particularly important roles. Now one might expect that a neuron from a human will differ dramatically from one from a fly. Maybe the human’s will have especially ornate ways of communicating with other neurons, making use of unique “neurotransmitter” messengers. Maybe compared to the lowly fly neuron, human neurons are bigger, more complex, in some way can run faster and jump higher.

We study hard to get admitted to a top college to get a good job to get into the nursing home of our choice. Gophers don’t do that.

But no. Look at neurons from the two species under a microscope and they look the same. They have the same electrical properties, many of the same neurotransmitters, the same protein channels that allow ions to flow in and out, as well as a remarkably high number of genes in common. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.
So where’s the difference? It’s numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human’s 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.

Erin Schell

Neuroscientists understand the structural bases of some of these qualities. Take language, that uniquely human behavior. Underlining it are structures unique to the human brain — regions like “Broca’s area,” which specializes in language production. Then there’s the brain’s “extrapyramidal system,” which is involved in fine motor control. The complexity of the human version allows us to do something that, say, a polar bear, could never accomplish — sufficiently independent movement of digits to play a trill on the piano, for instance. Particularly striking is the human frontal cortex. While occurring in all mammals, the human version is proportionately bigger and denser in its wiring. And what is the frontal cortex good for? Emotional regulation, gratification postponement, executive decision-making, long-term planning. We study hard in high school to get admitted to a top college to get into grad school to get a good job to get into the nursing home of our choice. Gophers don’t do that.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Throughout the entire film I was thinking about how much it reminded me of Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. I realize this is an interesting contrast - the two films are essentially two sides of the exact same coin. Triumph of the Will represents the power and polish of a totalitarian government. Like any piece of brilliant propaganda, it shows the public what it is supposed to think. Hitler himself called the film, an "incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement." The same holds true with Battleship Potemkin - it too is propaganda that feeds the public an image. This image is, however, the opposite image that Triumph of the Will portrays; it shows a crippling, murderous government. Reifenstahl's film uses a more sophisticated visual language - it is more refined, eloquent , and poised. While Eisenstein's film is more rough, crude, and vulgar. Both, however, are using the same tools to tell their story. One has the poor helpless people who are oppressed by their government and the other has a triumphant and admirable government leading its people to their rightful place in the world - or so the propaganda would suggest. I just thought that although the film language used in these two films are very different, they reminded me of each other...

Consequently I read that it took 6 months to edit Triumph of the Will, and that the actual running time of the film only represents around 3% of the footage that Riefenstahl actually shot (imdb.com). I also thought it was interesting to note that Steven Spielberg used a nearly identical shot from another one of Reifenstahl's Nazi films called Tag der Freiheit - Unsere Wehrmacht. Spielberg opened and closed his film, Saving Private Ryan, with a shot of an American Flag blowing in the wind backlit by the sun - giving the flag a translucent quality. This was done by Reifenstahl with the Nazi flag in her 1935 film - how ironic. Consequently Reifenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. She was quoted as saying, "I filmed the truth as it was then. Nothing more..."

The "truth" she filmed was heavily edited to make it seem like absolute truth which was then fed to the German people - it was a beautifully shot trap. A trap which nearly all of Germany bought and then fell into; it really was a deadly type of language...

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The Twisted Art of Documentary

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (1948)
a film directed by Stuart Schulberg and restored by Sandra Schulberg and Josh Waletzky

A Film Unfinished (2010)
a film directed by Yael Hersonski

AP Images

Hermann Göring, front right, during a recess at the Nuremberg trials, November 24, 1945. At front left is the American intelligence officer G. M. Gilbert, who served as prison psychologist and interpreter for the Nazi war criminals.

The function of propaganda is…not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

All governments make propaganda. The difference between totalitarian government propaganda and the democratic kind is that the former has a monopoly on truth; its version of reality cannot be challenged. Past, present, and future are what the rulers say they are. Which is why, from the official point of view, there is no stigma attached to the word “propaganda” in totalitarian societies. Nazi Germany had a Ministry of Volk Enlightenment and Propaganda, and the Soviet Union a Department for Agitation and Propaganda.

The idea that rulers should impose their own realities exists, at least as an aspiration, in democracies too. It was nicely summed up by a US government official not so long ago who stated that “we [the Bush administration] create our own reality.”1 But democratic governments and parties are not supposed to dictate the truth. We expect partisanship from our politicians; they can try to make their case. But the word “propaganda” has a negative connotation. It smacks of coercion, or official lying. And so propaganda cannot be called that, but must be disguised as “news,” or “information,” or “entertainment” (Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver). The propaganda department of the US government during World War IIwas called the Office of War Information, and on several occasions during the last Iraq war heroic myths were presented as news stories.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Saturday, November 6, 2010

I think I've always been fascinated by numbers. Not in the ways mathematicians are fascinated by numbers, but by the shapes of numbers.This week, the odometer in my car approached and then passed 100,000. As it did so, as numbers lined up in striking patterns, there were several almost magical moments for me:099990099999100000100001100100Why magical? Because of the shapes, I think. Because out of the visually unremarkable sequences that lead to 097392 or earlier to 0769124, suddenly there are repetitions of such order and weight that they seem noteworthy.Perhaps they even seem meaningful.Not, of course, when I ponder what they mean: they don't mean anything. They won't reveal the philosopher's stone. They won't help me with my cooking. They don't tell me anything more than do the numbers 100152 or 098563, which are both indications of how many miles the car has put behind it since I drove it off the lot.But theyseem, theyfeelprofound, profoundly different from the less well ordered numbers.Slot machines have a similar fascination for me, doubled up by the fact that when the three red sevens appear in a row along the line the machine makes sounds and flashes and quarters or nickels come cascading out of the machine.Along with casino owners who take advantage of my need for shapely sets of numbers, poets, novelists, and musicians all capture my imagination with orderly and repetitive sequences.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Sometimes the shape appears shapeless if we are approaching it from a different point of view.

Anyways......

Today's class reminded me of a piece of art I once saw in a museum. The room was empty except for about 5 strings linking the ceiling to the floor. The piece was interactive because you could walk in between the strings and look at them from different angles. I asked about the piece and was told that when the piece arrived it was in a small envelope with the a small card. The card had a formula on it explaining how the strings should be arranged. The size could be large or small depending on the space. John Cage's 4:33 appears to be similar to me because if you are going to play it there is a "formula" to follow. Alex slightly mentioned a constellation during class. Does anyone have a clue as to what he meant? Could it be the constellation's points are like a formula?

Monday, November 1, 2010

In today's podcast, we get a tantalizing taste of words in the wild, from the jungles to the prairie. Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro tells us about Klaus Zuberbuhler's work in the Tai Forest of West Africa. When Klaus first came to the forest, he hit a wall of sound. But he slowly started making sense of that sonic chaos by scaring a particular monkey called the Diana Monkey. Turns out, the Diana Monkey is making more than just noise. Then we jump from the jungle to the prairie, where Con Slobodchikoff has discovered what he calls a grammar of color, shapes, and sizes embedded in prairie dog chirps. His discovery leaves Jad and Robert wondering whether we could ever understand the language of a different species. Back in the jungle, Klaus is wondering the same thing, and tells us about one day when the cacophony of monkey calls distilled into a life-saving warning.